iOS 5 features a bug that allows photos to be seen on locked device

Since Apple released iOS 5 late last year the software has experienced some teething troubles with some users complaining of worsening battery life on their devices. Now it seems that iOS 5 features a bug that allows photos to be viewed on a locked device.

A clever tech consultant from Canada, Ade Barkah, has found an issue that allows photos to be seen via the lockscreen camera button on an iPhone running iOS 5. According to Cnet this happens even if the handset is locked via a pass code. Apple added an easily accessible button with the latest software so users wouldn’t miss those special shots.

To try it on your own device just double click the home button to access the camera, but then if you do try and access the photo gallery you get the message that tells you to unlock your handset to view photos and videos.

But if you go into the Phone’s settings and change the date to in the past, and try to access the photo gallery again you will be able to see all the photos taken since that date. Barkah said in his blog that if your iPhone clock goes back, “all images with time stamps newer than your iPhone’s clock will be viewable from your locked phone”.

You may be wondering why the iPhone clock would ever roll back as most users have the date and time automatically set. But if you travel across time zones the date could be accidentally set incorrectly, and Barkah wrote about the problem while traveling between Canada and Argentina by road.

There is always the chance an issue could reset the iPhone clock to epoch time, or if the device is ever synced from an external source like the cell phone carrier. Currently Apple hasn’t responded to the issue.